Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Something Simple

I made my philosopher janitor story HTML strict. It is pretty much the only piece of writing I've done that's come out half way decent; so I figured I should try to present it in the best format possible.

This is the story where the janitor cleans so well that he cleans himself out of existence.

Sadly, parts of it are true. I worked in one office where a janitor was fired because a person claims to have lost two pennies. In another office, the janitor was canned because an executive placed important company records on the trash can for the evening, and the janitor threw out an extremely important report.

The story was originally an epic poem about the janitor. I decided to change it to a mix of poetry and prose.

The real point of the poem was that we all see the world from different perspectives. The janitor sees the world as a thing that needs to be maintained. He also spends his life working in negative space. There is all of this stuff in life. What we remove all of the fluff and gradually dig down to ourselves.

The predictable twist of the story is that janitor starts out seeing cleaning as a moral question, but later sees it as an existential question.

Anyway, what I thought would be a quick clean up of code (just before bed) turned into an epic struggle itself.

Replacing the tables with a DIV took about 2 minutes. Formatting the page in HTML strict took about 15 minutes. The thing looked good in Internet Explorer. Getting an HTML Strict document looking passable in Firefox took an hour and a half. I still can't figure out how to get rid of one gap in the document.